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Small Business Saturday! Everyone’s favorite shopping day, it’s a welcome antidote to the mad competition of Black Friday. And for those of you in the neighborhood of Santa Cruz, when I’m finished sauntering through the Sock Shop and Bookshop Santa Cruz, I’ll probably pop by my favorite eating place, Oswald–who are open tomorrow just from 7-11 and with a limited menu, but which should be sufficient to keep all us indie business enthusiasts very well fed and bountifully watered.

So if you’re shopping in Santa Cruz tomorrow, remember the folks at Oswald. Who yes are friends of yours truly, but they’re also a Santa Cruz business well worth supporting.

Not a lot of people can count play as part of the job. I’m very lucky this way, since doing fun things goes under the header of “building community” and that’s what authors do, right?

So when I buy some sparkly flapper dresses and drag the family into climbing into them for photos, that’s the job, right?

And when I spend a day making Italian cookies and trying out different drinks and meatball recipes and taking snaps of them all, that’s a writer hard at work, isn’t it?

And when I have seventy-seven different shots of the same cookies and I spend an hour trying to choose which one is best, that’s hard labor, surely?

After all, book trailers and illustrated book club kits are what you guys want as a side with your Island main dish, aren’t they?

So what do you think: which is the best shot of those zaletti for the book club kit? Or should we just eat them and be done with it?

“Salute!”

(If you’d like to receive the book club kit when it’s ready, the week of publication, the Random House page is here. You’ll need a transaction number from your receipt for it, although the kit will go public, too, after a bit.)

I meant to share with you pictures of my new favorite spring fare, that I got just before I set off for New York and wish I’d had more days to gorge on them: ramps and purple asparagus.

Ramps are a kind of wild onion with an extremely limited season.

And the purple variety of asparagus turns dark green when you cook it (unless you use something to stop that, but I find doing so changes the flavor). It has a more intense flavor than the usual green kind, and yes, we conducted a taste test to see if we could tell the difference. Grilled, it’s incredible. With the ramps.

I love the foods of summer. Bye-bye squash and cauliflower, hello strawberries and tomatoes with actual flavor rather than vague redness, a panoply of peppers, Romano beans, white peaches, and… corn.

Ah, corn. When sweet corn first begins to appear—ears that haven’t travelled a thousand miles, with kernels as chewy as the husk—just giving it a quick boil is enough. Then the next day, sliced off and stuck in salads, or mixed with red peppers, black beans, and celery, with some oil and red vinegar.

But as the season goes on, simplicity palls. And that’s when sautéed seeds come into play.

Stick a tablespoon or two of mustard seeds (either yellow or brown) into a fry pan, with a cover, and turn up the heat until they start to jump around. When they’re popping nicely, turn down the heat and, when the jumping slows, take the pan off the heat. Tip the lid and slip in and any other seeds you like—I like sesame, although you can use caraway or fennel if you want their strong flavors. (I love onion seeds, if you can find those.) Shake the pan a few times so the seeds cook evenly, then add a couple tablespoons of oil and the kernels sliced off four or five ears of corn. (This is white corn, very sweet to begin with.)

Put it back over the heat, stir a few times, and add a little water, maybe 1/3 cup. Put the lid back on and let the corn steam a few minutes, stirring once or twice.

Then take off the lid and cook the corn, stirring and scraping the bottom occasionally—you want it to brown, but you need to watch closely, since the natural sugars will burn (especially if you scrape the ears to get the inner sections left behind, as I do.) Leave for a few minutes, then stir, repeat a few times until the whole is beginning to brown but nothing has burned.

Then add a few tablespoons of water to help scrape the tasty caramelized bits from the bottom of the pan, and to break up the clumps that have formed on the spatula. When the water has evaporated but the corn hasn’t yet started to stick, enjoy. (Pardon me, but isn’t it time for lunch?)

You can, of course, do all kinds of things to this: stronger flavored seeds, two or three shakes of smoked paprika, a good dash of cayenne, diced red or hot peppers added in the last minutes of cooking, other vegetables or beans—you name it, pretty much anything goes. But try it first unadorned, and see if you don’t fall in love with the simple nutty sweetness of the corn itself.

I got married during a time when I had been deeply immersed in setting up a coffee store called Kaldi’s (see Monday’s post.) Our honeymoon was an academic journey into the South Pacific, eight months through Papua New Guinea, the Australian outback, and island-hopping across the ocean from Tonga to Easter Island.

And in many of these places, coffee grew. Not in the Outback, of course, and I didn’t see any in Easter Island (both are places with few shrubs and fewer trees) but in the PNG highlands

and in Tahiti, generally beneath the light shade of trees such as the casuarina.

coffee grew all over. Often it’s grown in small plots. Farmers clean it, dry it, and squat with their little sacks along the road, waiting for the buyers’ trucks. The small bags of green beans are collected, sorted, and sold it in larger quantities–

–or roasted, ground, and sold in smaller quantities.

Interestingly, many of the small farmers clean their beans by giving them to their kids to chew off the husk of the berry. Fortunately, the heat of the roaster gets rid of any of the kids’ germs.

We drank some lovely coffee, there in the South Pacific. Some pretty mediocre coffee too, it must be admitted. But on the trip, I did say hello to many plants.

So, you have some freshly roasted, gorgeously brown beans, from Ethiopia or Costa Rica.

What to do next?

Mahmoud Hazr has one approach:

Mahmoud set the mortar and pestle to one side and reached for the incongruously homely English saucepan of steaming water that Ali had set to boil, filled from a skin hanging off the rafters. Picking up the tallest of three long, thin brass coffee pots, he poured the ground coffee into it, followed by the steaming water. After a minute he skimmed off the foam and allowed the coffee to subside, then poured the mixture into a smaller pot of the same shape. He added a pinch of spice, stirred and skimmed it again, and finally poured the tar-like coffee into four porcelain cups without handles that nested into the palm of the hand. It was unlike any Turkish coffee I had ever tasted, fragrant with the cardamom and thick enough to spoon from the cup.

And there’s another method—two of them—in an upcoming story:

I watched Holmes’ growing impatience as his brother fiddled with his new patent coffee contraption (which, frankly, produced a beverage indistinguishable from the boiling-beaker-and-old-sock method we used over our laboratory’s Bunsen burner)

Problem is, there’s such a dizzying array of brewing methods, where to begin? Me, I prefer the French press system, where you put the coarse grounds in your (warmed) glass or (in my case) insulated metal pot, pour in the less-than-boiling water,

and let it sit for a minute before pushing down the mesh filter. It’s not as thick a brew as Mahmoud’s, but if you object to a film in the bottom of your cup, you’ll probably want to use a paper filter instead. Or old socks, I suppose (assuming they’re clean.)

You could also play with the more exotic methods: if you find coffee acidic on your stomach, there’s a number of cold-brew methods. If you just want a cup when you wake up in the morning, use a good automatic drip pot with a time setter. (Although if you use an automatic pot, for God’s sake drink your coffee quickly, since letting the delicate oils stew over a hot plate makes for a truly disgusting brew.) If you want to go for a method with flair, try a Chemex, or join the Aeropress cult, or something that resembles a 16th century rocket.

Coffee is one of life’s real joys: play with it, pay attention to it, and experiment with all its possibilities.

Over the years, I’ve introduced any number of people to the contagion of excellent coffee: a pound of some excellent beans and a decent grinder, I’ve created an addict for life.

Beans: what kind? Any beans you get in a coffee store is going to be Coffea arabica (the big, low-altitude robusta are only used in cheap coffees and instants.)

This is a shrub with shiny leaves and rows of gorgeous and incredibly fragrant white flowers running down the branches, that become pretty red berries.

Inside the berry are two pale green beans, little gems awaiting heat. The names you see in the shops—Kenya, Costa Rica, Tanzania, Kona—tell you where that coffee was grown. Mocha, for example, refers to the port in Yemen where a particularly magnificent little bean comes from: “Mocha Java” should be a blend of this with beans from Java—however, often it’s a far more generic blend. (So make sure you buy from a reputable shop.) Personally, I love the rich, almost winey Ethiopian and Yemeni beans, tiny ugly little sources of nectar, rather than the handsome, uniform, larger and more acidic Central American varieties. And because coffee has a habit of being raised in poor countries, I like to buy one of the Fair Trade kinds, which puts more income in the hands of the growers.

Then we come to the roast.

Mahmoud took his brother’s place at the fire, dropping to his heels and pulling open the drawstring of the leather pouch. He plunged his hand in, came up with a handful of pale grey-green beans, thumbed a few of them back into the bag, and then poured the rest of them into the skillet. It appeared we had earned the right to a cup of coffee.

Holmes had already warned me that in Arab countries, coffee-making was a long drawn-out affair. We sat in silence watching Mahmoud’s utterly unhurried motions, swirling the beans across the pan. The small green dots changed colour, grew dark, and finally began to sweat their fragrant oil. When they were shiny and slick and nearly burnt, Mahmoud picked up a large wooden mortar and with a flick of the wrist, tipped the contents of the coffee skillet into it, spilling not a single bean.

(O Jerusalem)

Coffee roasts range from medium brown to nearly black, depending on what you’re doing with it. The lighter the roast, the more complex—or perhaps less straightforward—the flavor. But there’s a lot more to it than just the color.

The beans have to be kept moving, the smoke has to be vented, once they reach their doneness, they should be quickly cooled—in other words, roasting is both an art and a science, and although dabbling in an art is always a lot of fun,

home roasting can be a bit of a commitment for those of who just want a good cup of coffee.

In any event, the only rules for coffee are, a good quality bean, and freshly roasted. Stale coffee is so disgusting, you’d be better off stirring some instant into hot milk.

In the 1730s, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a sort of miniature comic opera about a young woman devoutly addicted to coffee, and her despairing father who would do anything to break her of her habit. Because coffee is certainly not a habit suited to a lady.
I met this cantata in the seventies, when I owned a cheap portable turntable, which despite its speaker couldn’t hide the gorgeousness of Emma Kirkby’s soprano, yearning after her cup of coffee.

(Schlendrian)
You naughty child, you wanton girl,
Ah, when will I get my way?
Lay off the coffee, for me!

(Lieschen)
Dear Father, don’t be so strict!
For if I cannot drink my cup of coffee
Three times each day
In my torment I’ll turn
Into dried-up roast goat meat.

Ah! How sweet the coffee’s taste is,
Sweeter than a thousand kisses,
Milder than muscatel wine
Coffee, coffee, coffee must I have,

(Schlendrian)
If you don’t give up coffee,
You won’t go to any wedding feast,
Or even go for a stroll.

(Lieschen)
Agreed!
But just leave me my coffee!

(Schlendrian)
(Now I’ve got the little monkey!)
I won’t get you a whalebone dress of the latest fashion.

(Lieschen)
I can stand that.

(Schlendrian)
Then you’ll have to be satisfied
With never having a husband!

(Lieschen)
O yes! Dear Father, please, a husband!

(Schlendrian)
I swear it will never be!

(Lieschen)
Until I abstain from coffee?
Now—Coffee, be forever conquered!
Dear Father, mark, I’ll never drink a bit.

(Schlendrian)
And you in turn will have a husband.

(Narrator)
Old Schlendrian now goes off to see
If he can find a husband for this his daughter Lieschen—
But Lieschen secretly lets it be known:
No suitor may come to my house
Unless he promises me—
And puts it into the marriage contract—
That I will be permitted
To brew coffee whenever I want.

My husband was a tea man. He drank proper tea, from a pot, and although he was a truly and creatively dreadful cook, Noel made a better pot of tea than I did.

Coffee, though: that was all me. I have a long history with coffee. When I was putting myself through university, I worked in a coffee store called the Bean and Leaf, which sold, as one might guess, coffee beans and tea leaves. A few years later, a friend started up a coffee store in Los Gatos, and I was about the only person he knew with any actual experience with coffee apart from drinking it. So he hired me to set up and manage the store.

(This was at the same time I was starting my theology MA, and becoming involved in a whirlwind romance with my husband. Hey, why not?)

We called the store Kaldi’s, after the mythic goatherd who noticed his goats acting particularly frisky one day after they’d been eating the red berries from a shiny-leafed bush.

I start my day with two (large) cups of camellia sinensis, which has a fraction of the caffeine that coffee does, and allows me to ease into the day rather than hit the ground running.

Yes, this is black tea (as opposed to herbal tea, which M. Poirot calls his tisane, or Mma Ramotswe’s bush tea, which is Rooibus.) My first cup has a slight taste of almond in it, to build up my immunity to…um, no, wait, it’s just almond, not cyanide, and I like it because it’s friendly. My day’s second has been, for a long time now, Peet’s Russian Caravan blend, a blend of Chinese black teas with a trace of smoky Lapsang.

Green teas, where the leaves are immediately treated with a quick steam and a fast dry, are the more delicate product of camellia sinensis, refreshing and slightly bitter, particularly in the Japanese form. Here’s what they look like growing around a small settlement in Honshu.

Black tea is the same leaf, only fermented—or rather, oxidized, with the freshly picked leaves left to wither for a while, then battered around and left to darken before being dried, then sorted. “Orange Pekoe” (which has nothing to do with oranges) refers to the grade of tea, the fresh tip and bud of new growth. (“Fannings and dust,” on the other hand, are the very lowest grades of tea, being what’s left over when the good stuff is picked off, and those are what go into most tea bags.) And Lapsang Souchong is a Chinese treatment of the lower-quality leaves (ie, not the tip) by smoking them over a fire, which gives you the Laphraoig of the tea world. A cup of pure Lapsang is a bit assertive for most tastes, but often adds a thread of interest to more mellow teas. Such as, yes, Russian Caravan.

To my great sorrow, Peets tea is no more. My last tins of Russian Caravan are slowly disappearing over the horizon, and although I know there are substitutes—I could even blend my own, I suppose—my mornings just won’t be the same.

Now, George Orwell had some firm ideas about the making of tea—“one of the main stays of civilization.”

In 1946, when England was under rationing, he wrote an essay about the art, noting that the manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

His eleven golden rules (the essay is here; do read it) begins with using Indian or Ceylonese tea, and goes on to insist on a warmed teapot and sufficient tea for a strong cup. (“All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.”)

He continues: The tea should be put straight into the pot. No strainers, muslin bags or other devices to imprison the tea. Then, the water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours. After which one stirs the tea, lets it steep, pours it into a tall, not shallow cup, and adds milk (without the cream) to it. This is important: tea first, then milk.

Me? I am a sinner, at all levels. I even admit to what my mother’s English aunts would have scorned as “tea in bandages.” Beyond that, I imprison the Russian Caravan (which comes as loose leaves) in what would cause Mr Orwell to rise and declare the death of civilization: a filtering device made out of nylon mesh that drops into my cup.

And, I use an electric kettle that probably fails to keep the water at precisely 212°.

Oh, the shame. Well, at least I pour in my milk (non-creamy) afterwards.

I am more of a snob with my coffee, but let’s talk about that another time.